Ask any salesperson or business owner what their three biggest challenges are, and one of them will be “finding new prospects.”  Millions (if not billions) of dollars are spent every year in order to market, advertise, and sell products and services.  Much of this is wasted, though, because it doesn’t actually lead to the relationships that create sales.  Endless Referrals fills an important role by acting as a sort of almanac for salespeople on different ways to prospect and bring potential clients into their pipeline.

In fact, I think the book should be called Endless Prospecting, because it covers way more than just referrals.  This broad scope (which also makes it scattered and hard to follow at times) is its main strength, because it gives a great overview on the different activities that can generate leads for a salesperson.  It allows the reader to pick and choose which activities to implement into their own business.  In many ways, Endless Referrals is for salespeople what Guerilla Marketing is for small business owners. 

Big Thought

People do business with, and refer business to, those that they know, like, and trust.  Do everything you can to make sure that people know, like, and trust you, and you’ll have a steady flow of referrals.

Implications, Ideas, and Questions

• Bob throws out this old sales adage, which he calls the Golden Rule, early in the book, and I couldn’t agree with him more: “All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know like and trust.” (pg. 6)
• Here’s a great networking line that I’ve heard before, but it took reading it in Endless Referrals for me to start implementing it: “How can I know if someone I’m speaking to is a good prospect for you?” (pg. 31)  It’s powerful because it shows a genuine interest in the other person and their business.  The only challenge can be that sometimes they don’t know how to articulate who their ideal prospect is.
• Bob gets into a long-winded, and in my opinion dubious, discussion of how to position yourself as an expert.  The problem is that too many people try to position themselves as an expert without actually being one.   He uses article-writing as an example of how to position yourself – that could work if you have the time, inclination, and talent to write.  (Blogs are a useful tool if you have something to share and you can share it well – but too many people don’t and can’t).  What is useful, though, is the idea of “positioning” yourself in the minds of your network, which I feel comes from being clear about the value you provide to the people you work with.
• As far as the online world goes, he points out the internet has “tools, not the panacea” for developing business (pg. 125).  I couldn’t agree more.  In all the training I do on social networking, the biggest misconception people have is that it will solve all of their problems.  In the end, people do business with people they know, like, and trust, the internet just gives us more tools to create those relationships.
• If you are in outside sales of any kind (and that includes small business owners and entrepreneurs who have to sell), Chapters 11 and 12 are a must read if you want your customers to give you referrals.  He’s spot on with the process, the scripting, the reasons to ask, and the reasons that most salespeople don’t ask.

Should you read this book?

Yes.  I think anyone who is an outside salesperson or sales-oriented small business owner will get a lot out of Endless Referrals.  I think the first 6 chapters are especially relevant for those who are just starting out with networking, or who want to make their networking more profitable.  The rest of the book will help those who are trying to build other parts of their prospecting.

One of the most important pieces of powerful networking is building successful, long-term relationships.  That’s why people who take a short-term view to networking usually fail - you can’t take shortcuts to building relationships.  Just as your personal relationships take time to nurture and grow, so too do your professional connections. 

It does take time to build connections with the people in your network, but you can accelerate the process by focusing on the quality of your interactions – and always keep your networking goals in mind.  There is an old sales adage that says “people do business with people they know, like, and trust.”  These are good guidelines for building your professional relationships.

Know – For your network to be an effective source of business, people have to know who you are.  You have to come to their mind when they think about your field or industry; so that when they have a need or a referral in your area of expertise, you come to mind first.

Like – How do you make someone like you?  It’s not about pandering to them and being inauthentic.  The best and easiest way to get people to like you is to find connections with them.  We like people who are like us, so find the common ground that you share with individuals in your network.

Trust – The best way to develop trust is to always have the other person’s best interests in mind. Be focused on finding win/win scenarios, and always follow through on what you say you’ll do.  You build trust in the professional world the same way you build trust in your personal relationships.

Do you remember when you had to actually “dial in” a radio station?  You’d go through a bunch of static until you’d start to hear a song, and you would slow down as the song became louder and the static quieter.  Then you’d fiddle with the dial until it was just right and there was no static and all you could hear was the song. 

This demonstrates the idea of noise vs. signal.  In this case, the signal is exactly that, a signal broadcast by a radio tower that is picked up by the receiver in your radio.  The noise is the background -the random radio signals that come from hundreds of different sources and have no discernible pattern – they could be remnants of a radio signal from a station across the country or the remnants of the big bang (really!).

This concept of signal versus noise can also describe what it’s like to live in our current, information-saturated society.  To an unprecedented degree, there are massive amounts of information available to us.  From television and books, to the internet and Twitter, there are so many people and organizations creating information and sending it out that it’s bewildering.

Some of this information is valuable to us.  It relates to things that are important in our lives, and it’s relevant and accurate.  So much of it, though, is not relevant, accurate, or important.  Marketing, for example, has exploded to such point that there is almost no place that you can be without someone trying to “share” information with you – whether it’s waiting for the train, filling your car with gas, or using the bathroom.

So even though the signal, the amount of useful information, has increased, the noise has increased exponentially faster. 

What can you do about it?

The most important thing to do is become an astute judge of the information that is coming into your mind.  Not every piece of information has the same value.  Just like tuning in a radio station, you need to keep rejecting the noise until you get to the signal.  For example, be very deliberate where you get your news reporting.  Most traditional sources of journalism have swung over to the noise side of the spectrum.  The 24–hour “news” networks are just one example of this; there is probably 15 minutes of valuable information in every 24 hour period – the rest is just fluff (noise).

There will always be noise.  Our job is to filter it out, to find the signal that is too often being crowded out by everything else.  When you do get to the signal, you will find that decision-making becomes easier, because you have the right information to base your decisions on.  You will find you have more time and energy, because you aren’t getting bogged down considering all of the unimportant information.  Lastly, you will create a lot more clarity in the signals that you put out as you realize that the world doesn’t need more noise.

Josh Waitzkin became a world-class champion in two seemingly unrelated fields – chess (they even made a movie about him) and Push Hands Tai Chi.  On the outside these may seem like totally different worlds, but both of them are  activities that require high levels of internal control to be successful.  And Josh became an expert in developing that mental and emotional control.

Josh uses The Art of Learning to examine the processes he used to develop mastery in these two fields.  He follows a biographical time line to do so, but he’s really more concerned with the lessons he learned at each stage of his climb to mastery.  While many of us don’t have the time, motivation, or intrinsic talents to be world-class chess players or martial artists, there are many ways that an improved understanding of how to learn new skills can help in our daily lives.

Big Thought

Developing the fundamental skills of learning is an important part of mastering any discipline. The degree to which individuals can view the learning process as a constant, step-by-step, gradual process is the degree to which they can attain the mastery that they are seeking.

Ideas, Implications, and Questions

• “I believe that one of the most critical factors in the transition to becoming a conscious high-performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition.” (pg 80)  It’s interesting that the people at the top of their field always seem very comfortable with who they are – so is one step of achieving mastery in a skill achieving mastery of self?  Josh says so and I agree.
• One of Josh’s basic paradigms that he consistently works from is the metaphor that life is a competition.  The Art of Learning looks at two very simple (although not easy), conflict-oriented activities, chess and Push Hands Tai Chi.  For me, this has been the main weakness of many who talk about peak performance – they almost always use the metaphor of life as conflict.  I think a more valuable question is how to develop yourself without looking at everything as a struggle that must be won.   How do you translate the lessons the lessons of conflict into useful tools for something that is variable and complex, for example, interpersonal relationships or developing a business?
• The idea of numbers to leave numbers is powerful (pg 74).  The idea of immersing yourself in the fundamentals of an activity so as to integrate them into your subconscious is incredibly useful, and one that most people tend to fight.  We want to be able to learn a new skill in a few hours – watch a video, read a book, go to a website – when it really takes time and practice (see the Rule of 10,000 in Outliers).  The people that invest in learning the foundations to a new discipline are the most successful in the long-term.
• One of the most useful tools that Josh describes is the difference between entity and incremental learning (pg. 29–31).  Figuring out which of the two paradigms of learning you follow can be really useful.  He posits that incremental learning is more powerful because it allows learning to be a process instead of an event, and it’s one that I agree with.  I’ve often seen people who are initially very successful at something become completely paralyzed when it gets too challenging.  Conversely, those who understand learning a new skill takes time, and that mistakes are a part of the process, come out on top in the long run.
• Speaking of mistakes: “My response is that it is essential to have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state.” (pg. 113)  I’ve worked on this in my life because I grew up thinking mistakes were bad, but being an entrepreneur has taught me that making mistakes is a valuable and necessary part of the process.  Ironically, the more I’ve become emotionally “OK” with mistakes and times where I’m not performing at a really high level, the more successful I’ve become.
• “Most of us are a complicated mix of greys.” (pg. 217).  Life isn’t black and white, and neither are we.  Amen.

Should you read this book?

Yes.  I found that it really challenged my thinking on what it takes to be a top performer and develop mastery of a skill.  I don’t think I agree with everything Josh wrote, but it speaks to his passion and skill that The Art of Learning made me contemplate my own views as much as it did.

With many people looking for work right now, what’s the best way to find a new job?  Is it the classified section of the newspaper, career websites like Monster and CareerBuilder, or maybe working with a employment agency or “headhunter”? You’ve probably heard the old saying: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”  There’s a reason it’s a cliche, however, and that’s because there’s truth in it.  One of the best sources for information on new opportunities remains your network of family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. 

Instead of passively waiting for their network to come to them however, the smart job seeker views their network as a gold mine of information and actively leverages their relationships.  Networking with your personal and professional contacts is a way to expand your reach.  For example, many companies actively seek employee referrals from their current staff (which also means that the best jobs never show up on a website).  By working to build and strengthen your network, you benefit from this influence.  Here are four ways to build the value of your network: 

Cultivate (all of) your Current Network

Too often when we start to look for a new opportunity we believe we have to meet new people.  While it’s always a good idea to expand your network, you don’t want to miss the value of your current network.  We already know hundreds of people, and those people also know hundreds of people.  So even before we meet someone new, there’s literally thousands of people already in our personal network.  One of the ways that technology can help cultivate your existing network is through social networking websites.  Websites like Facebook and LinkedIn are great at keeping you connected with the people you know, and they also help you connect with the people your network knows.  If you aren’t using these sites already, it’s worth spending some time to join them.

Even if you aren’t best friends with all of the people in your network, they can still be a valuable source of opportunities and information.  Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, recounts a study done by Mark Granovetter on how people found new jobs.  Of those who found work through a personal contact, over 75% found it through an acquaintance – someone they saw only occasionally.  Pay close attention, then, to your acquaintances – people you know but don’t see all the time.  They tend to move in different circles than you, and are usually aware of different opportunities.

Ask for Help

Take the idea of the “self-made” man or woman that you might have and throw it right out the window.  These days we need help to be successful, and that’s totally OK.  For others to help us though, they need to know that we need help and what we’re looking for.

Share with your network that you are looking for a new position.   That doesn’t mean you should start every conversation lamenting the job market and begging your friends to help you out.  It does mean that you should be comfortable telling people that you are looking for work and would appreciate any connections they can help you with.  Remember, the people you know aren’t mind-readers, and you’ll kick yourself if you find out later that they had a connection that could have helped you.

When letting your network know about your job search, be as specific as possible.  Too often a vague request gets a vague response.  It’s not effective to only say you are looking for a position in finance; let people know that you are looking for an “accounts receivable position in a health care company in the Chicago area”.  The more clear you are about what you are looking for, the easier it is for the people to identify possibilities for you.  You’ll actually improve your chances of finding opportunities by narrowing your focus!   

Follow Up

Something that continues to amaze me is how little time people spend on following up on the connections and opportunities they have in front of them.  I once attended a networking event for college students who were looking for an internship.  Over 50 students talked to me over the evening about an internship I had available – but only one followed up with an email the next day.  Guess who got the position?

There are so many ways to communicate in our society, it’s a shame when someone doesn’t take the five minutes to follow up on a conversation.  Networking is inherently about building relationships with others, and just like any other relationships, your network needs time and energy to thrive.  Whether it’s a phone call, e-mail, or letter, doing a little follow-up is a great investment of your time.

When should you follow up?

• Whenever someone lets you know that they may have a referral or an opportunity for you.
• Anytime you receive someone’s business card, send them a quick e-mail to say “I’m glad we met.”
• When someone gives you a good piece of advice, or gives you a connection.
• After every job interview.

Start Now and Don’t Stop

It’s easy to put effort into your networking when you are looking for a job, but every good networker knows that you should always be building and strengthening your network.  Once you’ve found a position, and even when you’re not actively looking for one, you should still focus on connecting with others in your network.  Too often people wait until they need something to put the effort in, which is like a farmer planting a field and expecting crops the next day.  To really make networking an effective part of your job search, it should be a consistent and constant part of your routine.

Find the time to send some emails, give someone a phone call, or meet a friend of colleague for lunch.  If you are consistently working to build new connections and strengthen your current network, you’ll find that there are always opportunities available.

Have you ever been stuck while working on a project?

Have you ever felt stressed out by the people around you?

Have you ever gotten sleepy around 2 in the afternoon, but you still had more work to do?

I’m sure you have, because we’ve all had these happen at one time or another.  Too often, though, we just try to muscle through it, which only makes it harder and more frustrating.  The trick is to have a handy tool that you can use to get through these situations with skill and ease.

I’ve found that one of the easiest ways to move past a mental block in your day (whether it’s work-, people-, or body-related) is to get up and perambulate.  That’s a good, long Latin word for “take a stroll”.  Whether it’s a walk around the building or around the block, take 15–20 minutes to get your body and brain moving.

Going for a walk helps for a number of reasons.  First off, you can do it anywhere, anytime.  Also, by removing yourself from your usual environment, it gives you space for your brain to find a solution to your block.  It doesn’t matter whether you are working on a project deadline or your co-worker is working on your nerves.  Let your mind wander as you walk  – you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the ideas that come to you. 

Also, by getting your body moving, you increase your energy level which boosts your mental capacity.  Even if you feel that you don’t have the time, get off your behind, because you’ll more than make up for any time spent walking with increased energy and productivity afterwards.  Walking is also better than caffeine and sugar because you avoid the energy-crash that accompanies drinking that afternoon cup of coffee or soda.

So the next time you find yourself stuck on something, go and perambulate.  It’s not just a big word that you can use to impress your friends and co-workers.  In fact, you can tell them the definition while you take them along with you on your walk!

Malcolm Gladwell has an uncanny ability to pick a small, below-the-radar aspect of human experience and use it as a jumping off point for an exploration of how our brains work.  In doing so, he usually goes well beyond the initial topic and invariably ends up creating a broad, but interconnected, web.  In the Tipping Point and Blink he looked at how ideas spread and how we make split-second decisions, in Outliers Malcolm examines the stories of why individuals become ultra-successful in different fields of endeavor.

Big Thought

For individuals who are massively successful in their field, the outliers, there is more to the story than just personal attributes.  They are able to excel to the highest level because of a unique confluence of social constructs, cultural environment, historical accident, and personal upbringing and experience. 

Ideas, Implications, and Questions

• Malcolm presents the outliers as people who have dedicated a great deal of time to their craft – using Bill Gates and the Beatles as examples.  The number that he reports as the magic amount of practice needed to achieve true mastery is 10,000 hours (pg. 47).  This is an interesting juxtaposition to the idea of the prodigy or genius who just “gets it” and spends very little time honing their skills.  Even if we aren’t looking for complete mastery of a subject (i.e. spending 10,000 hours on it), do we hamper our success by not devoting enough time to learning it?  Do we give ourselves and those around us enough time to practice and gain competence? 
• “People don’t rise from nothing.  We do owe something to parentage and patronage . . . It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words.  It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” (pg 19)  Context counts!
• In American culture, the focus on the individual has led to the mythology of the self-made man (or woman).  People who are successful are often viewed as islands, as paragons of individual virtue.  We see time and time again, though, that this is far from the case, that even the most rugged individuals have direct and indirect help from others.  Even though it’s a paradox, if we were able to accept as a society that it’s possible (even necessary) to be successful as an individual by getting help from others, there would probably be a lot more successes.  This is one of the most important ideas of the book, that “because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung.” (pg 32)
• I think Malcolm goes out on a limb a bit when he suggests that culture and language can affect something like mathematical skill.  As he looks at the stereotype that Asians are better at math, he examines the testing scores that show it is indeed true, and he looks at evidence that supports that idea of this success being cultural.  I think that the argument can be stretched too far, but at its core, it’s sound.  I think that there may be parallels in the challenges in trying to install democracies in the Middle East - in places where there is no cultural context or history for doing so.
• There is a commonality between what Malcolm writes about and Nassim Taleb’s idea of the “Black Swan”.  Just as Nassim puts a lot of power in the forces of chance, so too does Malcolm hint that sometimes what is needed to be massively successful is the luck to be the right person, with the right background, at the right place, at the right time.  It seems contrary to our thinking considering that we are steeped in the idea that the individual is responsible for their own success, but it also can be very illustrative of why some people succeed and others don’t.

Should you read this book?

Yes!  I think that all of Malcolm’s books are a great source of information about how we operate as individuals and as a society – and for that reason they are a great inspiration to personal contemplation.  By contrasting our cultural views of success with some of the hidden steps to be a top performing individual, Outliers frees us from an external and somewhat false concept of the path towards success and happiness.  This then allows us to pursue our success on our own terms, as well as help others along the way to theirs. 

Find out more about Malcolm and his writing at his website.

We all understand fear.  Even if we can’t clinically explain what fear is, we could tell someone what makes us afraid – and we could come up with that list quickly.  It would be easy to explain how it affects us physically and emotionally.  But what really causes fear, and why does it seem that when we are safer than ever we are more afraid than ever?

Based on the title, I was expecting the Science of Fear to examine the inner workings of the mind - the neurobiology and physiology in the brain.  What I got was something quite different, but equally as valuable.  Daniel Gardner synthesizes the current research on how humans make decisions and analyze risk to create a picture of how we judge the threats in our lives.  What he found is that not only are we biologically inclined to gravitate towards fear, but that there are a lot of people and organizations that use that inclination to influence our decisions.

Big Thought

The human brain is wired by evolution in a way that makes us unconsciously susceptible to fear in our decision-making, which often leads us to make inaccurate risk assessments in our personal lives and as a society. 

Implications, Ideas, and Questions:

• I think the most valuable idea that Daniel champions is the idea of our two distinct thinking “programs”, which he calls the Head and the Gut.  This distinction echoes what Malcolm Gladwell examines in Blink.  The idea that we are not rational decision-makers obviously has a lot of ramifications for business owners.  It’s especially interesting to look at how to successfully market when you realize that people aren’t going to make purchasing decisions in a rational manner, but rather at a subconscious, emotional level.
• This made me realize the truth behind the sales adage, “People buy emotionally, but they rationalize logically later.”  At its basic level, it means that we make our purchasing decisions with our Gut, and only later use our Head to justify our decisions.  It shows why the distinction between features and benefits is so important.
• Heuristics are the name for the shortcuts that the brain uses in decision-making.  It would be beyond the scope of this review to go through all of them, but Daniel does a great job in the book of describing how they work and how they compound with each other to skew our decisions when it comes to things that we fear.  More on heuristics on Wikipedia.
• For the second half of the book, a more accurate title would be “The Math of Fear”.  Daniel notes that when groups that have a vested interest in creating fear (the media, corporations who are marketing something, politicians) use numbers, they tend to misrepresent them, especially when using statistics.  He cites countless examples of organizations misusing statistical information to explicitly increase people’s fear.  The joke, “40% of all statistics are made up” isn’t a joke when people manipulate numbers in an attempt to manipulate others.  It makes me realize that every time I see a statistic somewhere I have to approach it with a degree of skepticism and to always take the source into account.
• “So why is it that so many of the safest humans in history are scared of their own shadows.  There are three basic components at work: the brain, the media, and the many individuals and organizations with an interest in stoking fears.  Wire these three components together in a loop and we have the circuitry of fear.” (pg 294)

Should you read this book?

Yep.  In a society that is saturated by people telling you to be afraid, it’s important to understand why we are so susceptible to their fear-mongering.  Fear won’t go away, but it’s important to put it in its proper place.  As Daniel concludes: only by learning how to “think hard” can we protect ourselves from “unreasoning fear. (pg 296)

For more on Dan Gardner’s work, visit his website